The air grew sulfurous with the reek of burning black powder. Mindful of the time, Cassie stood and brushed brown grass off her jeans as the band in the park struck up “God Bless America.” She led Thomas away from the park, approaching the motel from the treed north side of the street, and she was glad she had taken that precaution: a cycling blue glow visible from a block away turned out to be the emergency lights of two police cars, parked outside the wing of the motel where she had left Beth and Leo a few hours earlier.
Thomas had steadfastly refused to hold her hand on the walk back, but he reached for her hand now, and Cassie tugged him into the shadow of the trees where she was fairly certain they couldn’t be seen. The presence of the police could only mean that their descriptions had already been broadcast and that someone—the waitress at the restaurant, maybe, or the desk clerk at the motel—had recognized them and alerted the authorities. And if Leo and Beth had already been arrested—
But a voice called her name, startling her, and she turned to find Leo and Beth sharing the darkness of this stand of oaks.
“We saw the cops pull into the lot,” Leo said. “We left by the fire door. I have the stuff my father left me. But most of our luggage is still in there. Some of our ID. And most of our cash, except for whatever you’re carrying.”
Cassie felt a caustic weightlessness in her stomach. She felt the way she imagined a cornered animal must feel. “So what do we do?”
“I guess we start,” Leo said, “by stealing a car.”
12
IN THE MIDDLE OF OUR LIFE—NO, THAT wasn’t right.
In the middle of the journey of our life (yes) I came to myself in a wood (but not just a wood; what was it?) a dark wood, a dark wood where the straight way was lost…
Nerissa came to herself in an unfamiliar bed in a small room with the shades drawn. Ethan’s sleeping body was beside her for the first time in seven years, which was perhaps why lines from The Divine Comedy were running through her mind as she fumbled toward awareness, drawn out of sleep by daylight scything past the margins of the window blinds… reciting poetry to herself as if she were still chasing her degree, lost in memories more pleasant than yesterday’s. Oh god, she thought. Yesterday. The sickening weight of what they had seen and done.
When they first arrived here (a generic Motel 6 off the turnpike) Ethan had been exhausted and driving erratically. He had barely been able to strip to his underwear before he tumbled into bed and fell fast asleep. Nerissa had been equally exhausted but she had forced herself to stand under a hot shower before she followed him to bed, needing to wash off the stink, real or imagined, of kerosene and soot and blood and crushed green leaves.
And today might not be any better than yesterday. Face that fact, she instructed herself. Yesterday the simulacrum had blinded itself and she had cut off both its legs and tied crude tourniquets around its stumps and dumped its surviving fraction into the trunk of the car. Today she would attempt to interrogate it. Or bury it. Or both. Probably both.
What was almost as hard to bear as the physical horror of yesterday’s events was the look Ethan had given her, not once but several times, an expression of disbelief bordering on distaste. As if her actions had passed beyond the bounds of decency… and maybe they had, but that was a line she had stopped trying to draw.
Finding a place to interrogate Winston Bayliss was the morning’s pressing problem. This rented room wouldn’t do. So she paid the bill at the motel desk and they drove west, mostly in silence, and left the turnpike where Ethan’s map showed a nature reserve. It was a cold day, the wind tumbling blunt grey clouds from the western to the eastern horizon. They parked on the margin of the road in a stand of sugar maples and yellow birch. Nerissa opened the trunk of the car, and Ethan helped her carry Winston Bayliss into the shadow of the woods.
She had bound the stumps of the sim’s legs and wrapped a makeshift bandage over the clotted sockets where its eyes had been. She had covered the bullet wounds in its body with strips of flannel (from an old shirt of Ethan’s) and duct tape. She had wrapped what remained of its lower body in a plastic trash bag, to keep the mess inside, and that was how they carried it, Nerissa grasping its arms, Ethan supporting the bagged torso, stepping through drifts of brittle leaves and over fallen tree trunks colonized by yellow shelf fungus, until they were safely distant from the road. Then they propped Winston Bayliss more or less upright against an outcrop of mossy granite.
Inevitably, the sim was dying. What was surprising was that it had not yet died. The smell coming from it was obscene, the same odor Nerissa had tried and failed to purge from herself the night before, a stench so ponderous she imagined weighing it on a scale. She was careful to stand upwind.
The simulacrum’s voice was a moist, gurgling rasp. It began by asking for water. Nerissa put a plastic water bottle within its reach and watched as the simulacrum groped for it in the dry leaves. The creature looked oddly natural in this setting, she thought—as if it had grown from the detritus of the forest floor, mushroom-pale and streaked with autumn colors.
“Better just let it talk,” Ethan suggested. “Let it say what it wants to say.” Because that was all it would ever say. It would say what it wanted them to hear. Nothing more. Nothing less. It was beyond any power of coercion.
The simulacrum repeated some of what it had told them yesterday, about the hypercolony being part of a vast ecology that stretched across light-years of space. It addressed most of these remarks to Ethan, who listened without expression. It insisted once again that it was part of a parasitical system that had recently infected the hypercolony in order to commandeer its apparatus of reproduction.
Reproduction, Nerissa thought: Ethan had once called it the blade of evolution. There was no intelligence in evolution, only the cuttingboard logic of selective reproduction. She envisioned the work of evolution as a kind of blind, inarticulate poetry. What was it Charles Darwin had said? From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved… There is grandeur in this view of life.
Grandeur or horror. The idea that all the kaleidoscopic strangeness of biological systems could unfold without guidance or motivation was almost too unsettling to accept.
Ethan had written in one of his books that “nature knows without knowing,” and in his Society papers he had compared the hypercolony to an anthill or a termite nest. The anthill knows how to build itself, how to breed workers, how to feed and cosset its queen. But in fact the anthill knew nothing: what looked like knowledge was only a set of procedural rules, a chemical template constructed by a complex environment. And thus the hypercolony. It appeared to know far more than human beings—it even knew how to manipulate human beings. But it knew these things the way an anthill knows. It exploited language but it didn’t understand language. It excreted words the way a worker bee excretes royal jelly.
In its bed of leaves, the dying sim excreted words into the autumn air.
By human standards, it said, the hypercolony’s life cycle is immensely long. But it is finite. It begins and ends in a brief, intense pulse of reproductive activity, a kind of swarming, in which it broadcasts its progeny to distant stars. On Earth, that pulse began almost ten years ago.